Years into his career as a music critic, Wilson started wondering about his profession's reflexive dismissal of the work of some incredibly popular musicians – e.g. Celine Dion’s album Let’s Talk About Love – and he decided to examine that impulse in detail. That investigation became a cult hit, and this expanded edition is now crucial reading for anyone interested in the formation of taste in music or any creative work.

White Girls

"The New Yorker theatre critic’s essays on art/sex/race/identity test, touch, twist and transform."

The Infatuations

3 Summers

"So abstract, yet such a pleasure. Slip into the hazy heat of L.R.’s mind, one of the brightest places in Canadian writing."

—Carl Wilson

Flyboy 2

"First collection since 1992 (!) by one of the great living culture critics. Comet-hot ideas; prose powered by full funk technology."

—Carl Wilson

Giving Up

"A Montreal couple nearly cracks up trying to conceive both a baby and a work of art. A fable of love and futility, from a great new voice."

—Carl Wilson

Ann Goldstein

One of the most sought after translators of Italian literature, Ann Goldstein has translated all of Elena Ferrante's works into English. She has also translated the complete works of Primo Levi into English. She is the head of the Copy Department of the New Yorker.

"Translators rarely achieve celebrity status. But as Ms. Ferrante’s star has risen, so too has Ms. Goldstein’s. Her English translations of the four books in Ms. Ferrante’s Neapolitan series have sold more than a million copies in North America, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand." – Wall Street Journal

The Odd Woman and the City

"A compelling mixture of autobiography, literary criticism, literary history, and observations of local life made by the author as she walks in New York, where she’s lived for most of her life." – Ann Goldstein

The Door

"Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix, The Door is a disturbing novel, set in postwar Hungary, about the fraught relationship between a writer and intellectual and the enigmatic old woman who works for her. First published in 1987 but not translated into English until 2005, it examines the complexities of the bond between love and betrayal." —Ann Goldstein

In Other Words

Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, In Other Words is Jhumpa Lahiri's first full-length work in her new chosen language. Lahiri moved with her family to Italy in order to learn and write in Italian — a challenge that brought her new insight into identity and creativity. Fascinating and daring.

The Street Kids

Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, this is the story of Riccetto, a street kid living on the outskirts of Rome in German-occupied Italy, by controversial director, poet, writer and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini. Heavily censored and ridiculed when it was first published in 1955 as Ragazzi di vita, Pasolini's novel has since been redeemed as visionary for employing hyper-realism to portray the lives of the kind of people most art of the time preferred to forget.

Mark Greif

Flying Books' current guest chooser is Mark Greif, a co-founder of the high-profile little magazine n+1, where a number of the essays in his new book, Against Everything, first appeared.

In 2005 and 2007 his essays were chosen for The Best American Essays. His scholarly book, The Age of the Crisis of Man, was published in 2015 by Princeton University Press. In 2013-14, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, in its School of Social Science. In 2015, he was awarded the Charles Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

He is an associate professor at the New School in New York.

We Gon' Be Alright

"Jeff Chang is an intellectual who manages to be both famous and kind of underrated — maybe because his unmatched history of hip hop, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, and his history of diversity and demographic and social change, Who We Be, seem like ordinary (if magnificent) history books, rather than part of an overall project by a unique mind? Maybe We Gon’ Be Alright will finally change that — a book of essays, half dispatches and half historical dissertations, seizing upon this moment of Black Lives Matter and the transformation of African-American representation across North America to reveal much deeper patterns — elegant, powerful, and a book that only Chang could write."

— Mark Greif

Parallel Lives

"This is still one of my favorite modern books in any genre. Through scholarly micro-biographies, not of individuals, but of marriages —George Eliot’s, Ruskin’s, Dickens’s, John Stuart Mill's — Phyllis Rose wrote the profoundest feminist meditation on love, matrimony, fantasy, and fate I have ever read. It helps, of course, that she was working with some of the best-documented and most loquacious writers of the nineteenth century —well, it turns out their spouses were writing everything down, too, and from their own points of view."

— Mark Greif

Future Sex

"A brand new book with a title that understates the range and power of Emily Witt’s inquiry into contemporary fantasies of liberated love and sex. Witt makes herself a sensitive receiver for the weirdest intensities of post-Internet sexuality: online dating, cam porn, female orgasm cults, and polyamory, not to mention a little bit of assisted reproduction. I think the book displays depressive lucidity and doom. Other people seem to find it 'fun' and light-hearted. Regardless, you ought to read it."

— Mark Greif

Cubed

"This is an amazing book by my n+1 colleague Nikil Saval, the magazine’s current co-editor-in-chief. It’s everything it promises and everything it should be: a cultural history of how office workers wound up in cubicles; the good, bad, and the ugly of office design in the twentieth century; and a powerful mix of architecture criticism, social history, politics, and aesthetics from a gifted thinker and writer."

— Mark Greif

Walden

"Thoreau is supposed to be a nature-lover who withdraws from human beings to test himself. I guess all of that’s true: yet, somehow, it’s not that he loves nature, but that he takes it as an alien corrective of everything that’s too familiar in humanity; it’s not that he withdraws from human beings, but that he displaces himself to belong to their society differently; it’s not that he’s testing himself, but seeing who else he might already be, and could be in future, with unknown criteria and an unknowable outcome. So it’s a book that flips back and forth between the most mundane things, and a barely-articulable transcendence. One of the most difficult and best books I’ve ever read."

— Mark Greif

The Selfishness of Others

"The strangest and most wonderful book I've read this year. It sees with visionary clarity in muddy waters. Love, hatred, the Internet, psychology, egotism – it plunges us into their mysteries. A tour de force and a masterpiece of comic intellect." – Mark Greif

Michael Helm

Flying Books' current guest chooser is Michael Helm. Helm is a finalist for the 2016 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for his novel After James. His previous book, The Projectionist, was a finalist for the Giller Prize, and before that, In the Place of Last Things was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and Cities of Refuge was a Globe and Mail "Book of the Year." He is an editor at Brick Magazine and teaches at York University.

The End of Days

"This novel has been recommended to me by two readers who know my tastes well. I'm only halfway through, but even if it falls apart now, it's memorable, written well enough to surpass what might seem too neat a conceit: the same woman lives five variations on a life, dying five different deaths. We've long ago learned that the classical idea that 'character is fate' is too narrow. Chance has its say in fate. History has its say."

– Michael Helm

Senselessness

"This is one of my favourite short novels. It's very dark, and comic, and it employs irony in a way that registers but doesn't pretend to represent the madness inside the historical atrocities in Guatemala during the genocide."

– Michael Helm

Memorial

"I've loved all of Oswald's poetry books, but Memorial is especially wonderful. It considers the deaths of the extras in Homer's Iliad, those we know as names and nothing more. The deaths and sometimes the grief of family or survivors are described in high metaphor, inspired, compressed, beautiful."

– Michael Helm

Fortune Smiles

"I sent emails about this story collection to writer and poet friends and started one of those exchanges where highly articulate people sound flattened by their enthusiasm. We had different favourites, person to person, day to day. With great imagination and heart (and research) Johnson produces very strong anxieties and expectations, and then uses them against us for our pleasure."

– Michael Helm

Bobcat

"Michael Winter told me about this book. Like Adam Johnson, Lee has a range of subjects in her stories, but she uses a little more irony and strikes her own tones. Especially in short stories, which can seem a tapped out form, I look for depth and strangeness, and Lee offers both."

– Michael Helm

Iain Reid

Flying Books' current guest chooser is Iain Reid. Reid is the author of two critically acclaimed, award-winning books of nonfiction, One Bird's Choice and The Truth About Luck, which was one of TheGlobe and Mail's best books of 2013. Reid’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, and the National Post. In 2015, he received the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is his first novel.

Eileen

The Fifth Child

"A short but sinister novel that will rattle and unsettle. 'It's a horror story,' Lessing said of her book. 'I was very glad when it was done. It was an upsetting thing to write – obviously it goes very deep into me somewhere.''' – Iain Reid

White Noise

"An American masterwork. The New York Times said it so well: 'this is an America where no one is responsible or in control; all are receptors, receivers of stimuli, consumers.' Published in 1985, but still relevant today." – Iain Reid

The Whispering Muse

"A blend of several ancient and modern literary traditions and techniques, Sjón's magical writing is unlike most/all fiction being published in North America. A fun read that's still deceptively complex."

– Iain Reid

My Life in France

"The literary equivalent of a grilled cheese: straightforward, comforting, endearing, something you can consume happily in bed. A cookbook, a memoir, a travelogue, a love story." – Iain Reid

Amy Stuart

Flying Books' current guest chooser is Amy Stuart. Stuart won the 2011 Writers' Union of Canada Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers and was a finalist for the 2012 Vanderbilt/Exile Award. She is a graduate of the University of British Columbia's Creative Writing Program. She lives in Toronto with her husband and three sons. Still Mine, a national best-seller, is her first novel.

Station Eleven

"Imagine Toronto as ground zero for a virus that wipes out 99.9% of the world’s population. The odds of you and someone you love both surviving are grim. This thrilling and gloriously written book manages to be uplifting by reminding us to cherish what we have while we have it."

–Amy Stuart

In-Between Days

“This just-released graphic memoir tells of Toronto writer and artist Teva Harrison’s experience with metastatic breast cancer at age 37. Eloquently told through pictures and words, this story examines the most private and personal corners of life following such a diagnosis. This book will stay with you.”

–Amy Stuart

Fifteen Dogs

“My mother walks her pup in High Park, making André Alexis’ Giller winner the perfect gift for her and anyone who has known and loved a dog and/or the city of Toronto. Fifteen canines are given the gift (curse?) of human intelligence and must navigate the city and their lives with this new consciousness. Also starring Queen Street West!” –Amy Stuart

We Need to Talk about Kevin

"Word has it, in her late thirties, Lionel Shriver was wavering on motherhood and navigated her uncertainty by writing about it. What emerged was a story about a woman with the same ambivalence as hers who ends up giving birth to a devil child. I read this during my first pregnancy, fitting with my tendency to study worst case scenarios. Not a happy tale, but a gripping story about motherhood nonetheless."

–Amy Stuart

Between the World and Me

“Framed as a letter by the author to his teenage son, this is a historical, thoughtful, and uncomfortably honest look at the reality of being black in the United States. Though the political and social message is an important one, at its core this book is about a parent afraid for the life and well-being of his child.” –Amy Stuart

Sarah Bakewell

Sarah Bakewell was a teenage existentialist, having been swept off her feet by reading Sartre's Nausea at age sixteen. She is the author of three biographies, including the best-selling How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, which won the Duff Cooper Prize for Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Marsh Biography Award.

The Pillow Book

"Sei Shonagon was a lady-in-waiting in the Japanese empress’s court in the late tenth century; she used this book to record observations, scandals, tips, flirtatious poems, and points of etiquette. She also had a fondness for lists – of Annoying Things, Splendid Things, and Surprising or Distressing Things, such as when a comb breaks. It’s highly ritualised yet personal, and creates a wonderful picture of its time. If you want to know how fast a carriage of palm leaves should be driven, how to tie a letter with a sprig of blossoms, or whether sagebrush is essential in a single lady’s house, this is the book for you." –Sarah Bakewell

What I Don't Know About Animals

"Many books have been written about non-human animals and our relationship with them, often projecting our own imaginings on to their very different lives. This is a book about not understanding animals. It’s about how they attract, elude, and perplex us (and we them). Like most of Jenny Diski’s books, it’s witty, dark, subtle, and self-revealing, and nothing in it goes quite as you expect." –Sarah Bakewell

Pnin

"Nabokov’s hilarious and immensely poignant novel about the bumbling lecturer Timofey Pnin was based on his own experience as a Russian living in exile, trying to make sense of life in the English-speaking world. Pnin is an unforgettable character and the writing is pitch-perfect – all the more remarkable since Nabokov was not writing in his native tongue. I’ve read it six or seven times and never cease to be both charmed and just a little horrified by its vision of the hapless human condition." –Sarah Bakewell

Sapiens

"This has been a best seller, and no wonder: in just a few hundred pages, Harari tells the history of Homo sapiens from our (only partial) separation from the Neanderthals to our possible “posthuman” future. It’s vast in scale, precisely detailed, filled with exciting new perspectives on human identity – and beautifully written into the bargain." –Sarah Bakewell

Ostend

"It’s 1936 in the Belgian seaside town of Ostend, and a number of displaced literary refugees from Central Europe find themselves thrown together in the cafés and hotels. Among them is the Austrian Stefan Zweig, his old friend Joseph Roth, who is slowly drinking himself to death and struggling to create his last great novellas, and Roth’s partner Irmgard Keun, who is trying not to be dragged down into his self-destruction. They all write day after day, struggle with publishers, and try to survive. A deceptively slight-looking nonfiction masterpiece that quietly develops into the most moving account I’ve read of the Roth/Zweig circle and their uprooted, lost world – it captures the end of a whole European era." –Sarah Bakewell

Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti is the author of the acclaimed novels How Should a Person Be? and Ticknor, the short-story collection The Middle Stories, the children's book We Need a Horse, and the play All Our Happy Days Are Stupid. She is also the co-editor of Women in Clothes and co-author of The Chairs Are Where the People Go. She lives in Toronto (lucky Toronto!).

The Passion According to G.H.

"One of the most existentially startling books I have read maybe ever. Think of it as a companion to Kafka's Metamorphosis." –Sheila Heti

Two Serious Ladies

"One of the greatest delights of my reading life was discovering this book. Jane Bowles published very little during her lifetime. This novel’s humour, sentences, and story are so unusual, and her mind so glittering, unforgettable, and strange." –Sheila Heti

Going to Meet the Man

"This is one of the most powerful story collections. I don't think I've ever had a more vivid sense of what life was like in mid-century America—not only for blacks in cities and the south, but for anyone living during the tensions of the time." –Sheila Heti

Light

"Souvankham Thammavongsa (fellow Torontonian!) is an absolutely captivating writer. Her poetry collection, Light, is a perfect expression of her unique sensibility: heaviness and weightlessness, the ultra-fine touch, rare and delicate economy. I love this book." –Sheila Heti

The Loser

"Thomas Bernhard is the darkest, funniest writer. This book is about two friends, both musicians, who studied with Glenn Gould. One of the friends accepts Gould's genius, the other is wracked by jealousy and madness for having come so close to greatness, now knowing for sure that he doesn't possess it himself." –Sheila Heti

The Age of Scientific Sexism

"Written by Mari Ruti, a professor at the University of Toronto, this is a much-needed examination of evolutionary biology’s tendency to use the cover of science to spread (unscientific) sexist beliefs. You’ll read stories in the newspaper and engage with the culture so differently after reading this eloquent, heated essay." –Sheila Heti

Five Chimneys

"I don't understand why this book isn't more known and read. It's an account of an educated Jewish woman's time in Auschwitz, written soon after her release. It’s so incredibly painful, precise, and alive; so few of such accounts were written by women, and its rare perspective is a revelation." –Sheila Heti

Should You Leave?

"By the famed author of Listening to Prozac comes this entry into the self-help relationship genre, though this psychoanalyst’s skepticism about the genre is a major theme of the book. He answers whether to leave a relationship by looking at case studies—you’ll no doubt find yourself in there." –Sheila Heti

Audition

"I was obsessed with this book as a child, hoping to be an actress. It's a classic in its genre, interesting not only for actors, but for anyone wondering how to make an impression. Great anecdotes, and a wonderful portrait of a bygone time in American cinema and theatre." –Sheila Heti

A Life's Work

"Deeply honest accounting of one woman's experience with early motherhood. Controversial at the time of its publication, it pretties nothing up about those strange, early, harrowing days of motherhood. Women write like this more often now, but A Life's Work was one of the first." –Sheila Heti

Misha Glouberman

Misha Glouberman is the host of Toronto’s popular Trampoline Hall lecture series, which has toured North America. Misha is an expert in conflict resolution, communication, and negotiation skills, and teaches an ongoing series of classes on these topics entitled “How to Talk to People about Things.” He also lives near Flying Books, and walks by the store frequently. One day, I asked him if he would be a guest chooser. He said he only liked five books, and I said, "That's totally okay!" And now they're flying off the shelves, along with his book, The Chairs Are Where the People Go.

If you like the books Misha chose, you should take his amazing course, which you can find out about at mishaglouberman [dot] com.

Getting to Yes

"The most rewarding and enjoyable work I've done in the past few years has been teaching my course, 'How to Talk to People About Things,' which is mostly a distillation of ideas from Difficult Conversations and Getting to Yes. (Nearly as rewarding and enjoyable has been the ongoing project of applying the ideas in my own life.) They are both easy reads, presenting ideas that are very simple, but potentially transformative in great ways. I think these two books really complement each other, so I encourage people to read them both." –Misha Glouberman

Initially published in 1981, the internationally best-selling Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In is based on the work of the Harvard Negotiation Project, a group that deals with all levels of negotiation and conflict resolution – at home, in business, or anywhere. This is some comprehensive, proven win-win action in less than 200 pages.

Difficult Conversations

"The most rewarding and enjoyable work I've done in the past few years has been teaching my course, 'How to Talk to People About Things,' which is mostly a distillation of ideas from Difficult Conversations and Getting to Yes. (Nearly as rewarding and enjoyable has been the ongoing project of applying the ideas in my own life.) They are both easy reads, presenting ideas that are very simple, but potentially transformative in great ways. I think these two books really complement each other, so I encourage people to read them both." –Misha Glouberman

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most was first published in 1999, and this new edition has a foreword by one of the authors of Getting to Yes, which proves Misha has the right idea about reading the two books together. What if you had a step-by-step guide for talking to, say, your partner about money, or to a difficult coworker/employee/boss, or anyone, really, about anything you ever dreaded talking about? I just opened up the book and found this amazing nugget about dealing with conflict with someone: "Make them your partner in figuring it out." Of course! You're in it together! I think we should take Misha's advice to take Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen's advice.

The Consultant's Calling

"At first glance, this book seems to be simply a handbook for people who work as consultants, as I sometimes do. It is also, to my mind, a really remarkable, honest, and generous combination of advice and humility, of personal reflection and expertise. Bellman writes about his working life, and offers thoughts and advice based on his own direct experience, including a lot of genuine wisdom without pretending to have all the answers. The book is about how to be a fully developed human being while working as a freelancer, mixing very practical stuff with nice insights about values and relationships. If your work involves working for yourself, providing a service to clients, you might, like me, find it tremendously helpful." –Misha Glouberman

Filthy Lucre

"The first half of this book enumerates six false beliefs about economics that are commonly held by people on the right; the second half enumerates six false beliefs about economics commonly held by people on the left. The writing is laser-sharp, and Heath's ability to produce clarifying analogies and examples is amazing. Heath believes, 'Economic illiteracy on the left leads people of good will to waste countless hours promulgating or agitating for schemes and policies that have no reasonable chance of success or that are unlikely to actually help their intended beneficiaries.' If you want to have opinions about anything remotely related to the economics – wages, prices, equality, taxes, international trade, corporate personhood, employment, anything – please read this book." –Misha Glouberman

Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism, a national best-seller, is by Joseph Heath, author of The Efficient Society and co-author of The Rebel Sell. Heath is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto.

Ant Farm

"This book is really really funny." –Misha Glouberman

Ant Farm: And Other Desperate Situations is by Simon Rich, a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor and a writer for Saturday Night Live. Rich narrates the conversation at the grown-ups' table from the perspective of the kids' table; he narrates a kid at home alone from the mom's perspective; he illustrates in short, painful bursts, what happens when small-talk goes very wrong; among much other hilarity.

The Chairs Are Where the People Go

The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City is Flying Books guest-chooser Misha Glouberman's book, co-authored with Sheila Heti. The New Yorker called it "a triumph of what might be called conversational philosophy . . . hilarious and humane." So many copies sold before his selections went up in the store that I had to reorder it.

The jacket copy calls Chairs a self-help book for people who don't feel they need help, and a how-to book that urges you to do things you don't really need to do – which is apt. But it's also the only self-help or how-to book around that seems to understand real people and their quirks, limitations (real and imagined), and desires. Have you ever encountered a self-help/how-to book that both accepts you as you are and actually helps you? You'll feel better about being a human after reading this wise, thought-provoking, and very funny book.

Chosen by Lynn "I Love the Dead" Crosbie

Flying Books' very first guest chooser, for the auspicious occasion of Halloween, is the incomparable Lynn Crosbie, author of store best-seller Where Did You Sleep Last Night, a creepily obsessive tale of ghosts (one ghost: the ravishing Kurt Cobain) and smack and sex and punk, which will make the dreamiest of the ghoulish fantasists sigh.

A poet, novelist, cultural critic, newspaper columnist, and academic, Crosbie teaches at the University of Toronto and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her books include Pearl, Queen Rat, and Dorothy L'Amour. She is also the author of the controversial book Paul's Case and, more recently, Life Is About Losing Everything.

The Black Dahlia

In The Black Dahlia, the sainted James Ellroy splendidly (re)tells the most notorious murder in Los Angeles, with hard-as-nails prose and major tough-guy élan. He recounts in his memoir, My Dark Places, that this case obsessed him all his life, as his own mother was murdered, and his own mother, he believed, may have been the tragic Dahlia.

James Ellroy is the author of the L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz; and the Underworld USA Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's a Rover. He has started a Second L.A. Quartet, beginning with Perfidia. He lives in Los Angeles.

The Well-Dressed Wound

The ingenious, nefarious Toronto legend Derek McCormack’s brand new, massively anticipated and swooningly received novel is a story about life and death told by a brilliant madman. A book to be devoured, a book to haunt you deeply and reveal your own concealed, or drag-wounds. At its sweet heart: a dauntless, crazy, beautiful masterpiece.

Derek McCormack's previous books include The Show that Smells, Grab Bag, and The Haunted Hillbilly. He lives in Toronto. The Well-Dressed Wound was published by one of the coolest and most influential presses in North America: Semiotext(e).

Helter Skelter

Musician Michael Des Barres once spent a night on the Mexican border, trapped with no passport and a copy of Helter Skelter. He moaned and feared “Charlie disguised as Viva Zapata” all night long. No one gets out of this book alive! A valuable propaganda, with true heartbreak at its centre, this DA’s inflated account of one of the worst crimes of all time remains a true-crime sicko classic.

Vincent Bugliosi (1934-2015) was the prosecutor of Charles Manson and author of Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Outrage: The Five Reasons Why OJ Simpson Got Away with Murder, and other best-selling books.

Curt Gentry (1931-2014), an Edgar winner, was the author of J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets and Frame-Up: The Incredible Case of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings.

Dark Places

When Gillian Flynn evokes Dark Places, she means business. Like her soul-brother, Elmore Leonard (if less cool, if more daring), she rakes her nails across her pastoral setting to reveal terrifying cruelty, ignorance, and not the devil, but what fearing him can do: wreak pitch-black havoc and draw blood. Not for the faint of heart, and not to be missed, this makes Gone Girl read like a tea party with Nora Roberts.

Gillian Flynn is the author of Sharp Objects and the international best seller Gone Girl, which begat the hit movie, which begat a lot of close examination of a certain actor's anatomy in the shower scene near the end. She lives in Chicago with her husband and son. Dark Places was published by Crown.

Rosemary's Baby

King Creepy Ira Levin stomps on the gas in this prescient freakfest about the evil that men do. Average men, well, artists, are quite rightly portrayed as worse than the devil in this painterly, compulsively readable ultra-classic. What have we done to your eyes?

Ira Levin (1929–2007) was the author of A Kiss Before Dying, The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil, Sliver, Son of Rosemary, and This Perfect Day. He also wrote the Tony-nominated play Deathtrap, among many other scripts for the stage and screen.

Flowers in the Attic

Who can forget first encountering this horrifying, oddly erotic V. C. Andrews novel? Something like a bad-sexy Lord of the Flies, these fleurs du mal still chill, disgust, amaze.

V. C. Andrews' Flowers in the Attic was the first book in the Dollanganger family series, which includes Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and Garden of Shadows. Andrews died in 1986 at 63, but her name has been attributed to more than seventy novels, which have been translated into twenty-five languages. The dead can write.

Party Monster

A brilliantly rendered story about the New York City club kids, written by their doyenne, James St. James, Party Monster will drag you back to the 80s era of the lunchbox-toting “celebutante” and far worse. You will learn about the violent murder of an Angel by Club Psycho Michael Alig, just now out of prison and AT LARGE. Sickening, chic, and monstrous.

James St. James is also the author of the novel Freak Show, and, according to his Amazon bio, "now leads a quiet, sedate existence in Los Angeles." The film adaptation of Party Monster starred Macauley Culkin and Seth Green. His life was the basis of the 1998 documentary Party Monster: The Shockumentary.

So Much Pretty

Cara Hoffman’s So Much Pretty begins in the realm of thrillers — a charming small-town girl is missing — and moves into a site so disturbing, so wrenching, that this book will terrorize you for the rest of your days. And it will also make you wonder about what lies beneath the ordinary and decent; what vile, sightless, slithering things.

Cara Hoffmanis also the author of Be Safe I Love You. She teaches writing and literature at Bronx Community College and lives in New York City. So Much Pretty was published by Simon & Schuster.

The Bewdley Mayhem Stories

FromTony Burgess,northern Ontario’s high-priest of horror, comes the fearsome Bewdley Mayhem omnibus. This, the maniac genius’s first collection, is arguably his very best. By turns hilarious, vexingly brilliant, and teeth-screechingly fearsome, this book pleases and excites — and KILLS.

Tony Burgess's books include Fiction for Lovers, Pontypool Changes Everything, People Still Live in Cashtown Corners, The Hellmouths of Bewdley, and The n-Body Problem. In 2008, Bruce McDonald adapted Pontypool Changes Everything to film, and Burgess was nominated for a Genie Award and won a Chlotrudis Award for best adapted screenplay. The Bewdley Mayhem Stories was published by ECW Press.

Maldoror

Maldoror, by the dreaded Comte de L’Autréamont, a nineteenth-century malcontent, is an unspeakable tale of seductive brutality and luscious crime. An artistic masterpiece and the devil’s own coffee-table book, Maldoror is a peek into a sickly sweet, overripe soul.

The comte, born Isidore-Lucien Ducasse in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1846, and educated in Paris, had plans for a sequel that would stand in opposition to Maldoror. Where the first volume investigated evil, the follow-up would be all sweetness and light: "I replace melancholy by courage, doubt by certainty, despair by hope, malice by good, complaints by duty, scepticism by faith, sophisms by cool equanimity and pride by modesty." He intended the dichotomous pair to form a whole; but it was not to be. Napoleon III just had to invade Prussia. It didn't end well: Paris was besieged, epidemics ran rampant, and the comte took ill and died at twenty-four. His body was quickly buried in a provisional grave, then moved two months later to another grave elsewhere . . . or was it? Maldoror, evil first-born twin, lives on as a fragment.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Want some seriously vile downtime? Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Coldtown delivers, with monsters and ghouls and a corpse-strewn landscape that only the heroine (and her dopey, amazingly living boyfriend) can traverse towards saving the world from the chill and the scabrous and the furious dead.

Holly Black is the author of the best-selling young-adult fantasy novels Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale and the Spiderwick series. She has been a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award and the Eisner Award, and the recipient of the Andre Norton Award. Black lives with her husband in Massachusetts in a house with a secret library. The Coldest Girl in Coldtown was published by Little, Brown for Young Readers.